02335cam a22002537 4500001000600000003000500006005001700011008004100028100001900069245011000088260006600198490004100264500001600305520123000321530006101551538007201612538003601684690008201720690008801802710004201890830007601932856003702008856003602045w6504NBER20180524151426.0180524s1998 mau||||fs|||| 000 0 eng d1 aCosta, Dora L.14aThe Wage and the Length of the Work Dayh[electronic resource]:bFrom the 1890s to 1991 /cDora L. Costa. aCambridge, Mass.bNational Bureau of Economic Researchc1998.1 aNBER working paper seriesvno. w6504 aApril 1998.3 aI investigate how the relationship between the wage and the length of the work day has changed since the 1890s among prime-aged men and women. I find that across wage deciles deciles, and within industry and occupation groups the most highly paid worked fewer hours than the lowest paid in the 1890s, but that by 1973 differences in hours worked were small and by 1991 the highest paid worked the longest day. Changing labor supply elasticities explain the compression in the distribution of the length of the work day. In the 1890s the labor supply curve was strongly backwards bending, perhaps because men preferred to smooth hours over their work lives rather than bunch them as they do today. In fact, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution was slightly negative in the 1890s, but by 1973 was positive. I show that the unequal distribution of work hours in the past equalized income, but that between 1973 and 1991 it magnified weekly earnings inequality, accounting for 26 percent of earnings inequality between the top and bottom declines among men, more than all of the earnings inequality among women, and 17 percent of the increase in total household earnings inequality among husband and wife households. aHardcopy version available to institutional subscribers. aSystem requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files. aMode of access: World Wide Web. 7aJ22 - Time Allocation and Labor Supply2Journal of Economic Literature class. 7aN30 - General, International, or Comparative2Journal of Economic Literature class.2 aNational Bureau of Economic Research. 0aWorking Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)vno. w6504.4 uhttp://www.nber.org/papers/w650441uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w6504